Gut Microbes Improve Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy remains the standard treatment for advanced cancer, but it doesn’t always work as well as hoped. Can our gut microbes help us?
A world in our gut
Microbiome is a term that refers to any microbial community that lives in or on a multicellular organism. So we have a skin microbiome (even a distinct armpit microbiome), nasal microbiome, gut microbiome… In the popular press, microbiome is also sometimes used specifically to refer to the gut microbiome.
And this popular microbiome is implicated in a lot of aspects of our daily lives, from how we process our food, over our propensity for certain diseases, to our risk for Alzheimer’s, and even our personality traits.
In a previous article, we also saw how our gut microbiome affected our risk for cancer, as well as how cancer cells themselves have a distinct microbiome. In that article, we mused on the potential of recruiting our microbes to help us in the fight against the many-headed monster that is cancer.
Microbes to the rescue
There were already hints that certain microbiome compositions seem to have a positive supportive effect during chemotherapy, but exactly what was going on…
